A couple of quick links related to international relations, and so on...\n\n
I don’t actually endorse much of what the anonymous writer of this Salon article<\/a> is saying about the State Department, but I like this quote: “Powell is leaving. We need to repeat that.” As for the chances of Ms. Rice becoming the next Secretary of State, they don’t seem much higher than those of Mr. Wolfowitz. But then, who else is there?\n I happened to hear a Cambridge Forum<\/a> talk by John Ruggie<\/a> from February 27, 2002. In it, he argues<\/a> that it’s a mistake to talk about the UN being good or bad at certain things (such as peacekeeping or setting up elections), or having insufficient resources to do certain things; it would be better to talk about the member nations of the UN. In fact, he says, the UN doesn’t have independent resources, either of money or of troops or even of experts. They are dependent on their member nations, which of course means that they are most dependent on their richest, most powerful, and most expert member nation, in which Your Humble Blogger resides. I think that’s a bit disingenuous, myself, as the UN does have its own deliberative and administrative procedures, which could well render such resources as it has more or less effective, but the greater point is well taken. If the US wants the UN to be able to do such and such a thing, the US can enable it to do it; there is little the US can achieve on its own that it could not do with and through the UN, if it so chose.\n Michael Moore, with his usual subtlety, has a collection of soldiers’ letters coming out called Will They Ever Trust Us Again? Letters from the Warzone to Michael Moore<\/I>. There’s a selection<\/a> in the Guardian today, and the publisher has another short one<\/a>. This feeds in to my scenario for a landslide victory for the Senator: the military turns on Our Only President who has (shall we all say it together?) betrayed his supporters by closeting himself with a cabal of incompetent, secretive cronies. We on the left can be shocked by how much worse he is than we expected, but those who voted for him were the most betrayed, and none more so than those serving in the military and their families.\n